That’s a little antagonistic. Your whole comment is weirdly antagonistic.

> Either you started way too low, or you're going to end up paying a lot.

Or 1) you start by paying what people are worth according to “market rates”, 2) at some point they break even on what they cost, 3) every year they bring in more revenue than the last and you share it with them.

> The developers that you were able to recruit with your low starting salary are going to end up working alongside people who came for the high salaries and may very well be quite a bit more talented.

Sure, but they’re paid on performance not “talent”. Work is not a talent show. The people getting more money have successfully deployed projects worth much more than their salary. That’s why their salaries were bumped. If this new person can do that they’ll earn the same salary.

> And at the beginning, either you are keeping your plans of an eventual 3x salary secret from employees, in which case it can not motivate them, you are promising it to them which as an employee I would view with great suspicion, or you are writing some kind of agreement about it which seems like it has all kinds of problems.

Seems simple enough to me. You do the math on how much revenue you think your work has brought in. I do my own math, and we negotiate a number every few years.

> Employees get [equity] when it's cheap and it literally represents the value of the company that you were hoping to give them in the form of higher salaries

Revenue-aligned compensation is very different from an ownership share, both materially and in terms of what they represent.

> It's not based on some kind of vague aspiration to be a good boss

Paying people according to their contribution to the business model is neither vague nor aspirational, although it does require you to have a business model that includes your workers.

And equity calculations in my experience are pretty vague and aspirational. Not sure what you’re indicating at here.

> No new employee is going to resent a lower-skilled old timer for their equity- they earned it.

I’m not sure if what you’re describing is based on my actual advice or a misunderstanding so I’ll let you chime in if you think there’s still a resentment issue here.